Here – Now! Maybe… By Mariann Moery
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
Or as Raymond Charles Barker expressed it: “Yesterday ended last night.”
How much of our time is spent reviewing, reliving past experiences that brought little joy in their first experiencing and only grow more embedded as we mentally repeat it thereby strengthening it and the emotional cost to ourselves. I have been known to do this.
This summer I spent several weeks reading a book by Jack Kornfield : No Time Like the Present. Filled with exercises and understanding as he says on page 65:
When you are here, you see with greater clarity and respond with genuine love. There comes a growing capacity to accept and embrace what is here now with a courageous heart.
Being here – now, has become almost a throwaway line since Ram Dass created a rather amazing book with that title. It is a practice so simply stated and so very difficult to maintain for more than… well… nanoseconds for me. It’s not like I always mislike where I am or what I’m doing, it’s just that brain/ego/id – call it what you will – it likes to mess with us.
Yep, most of the time that whole struggle to be here – now, is a true power struggle and I need all the help I can enlist. Because just as I create the absent state of being, just so it is up to me to create the state of being present.
“You must live fully in the now to make your dreams come true… Frances Scovel Shinn
The only time in which I may create or experience my new design for living is now. …, there is only the fact that I may have barred from my experience of today much of the good it can hold. The past has no hold on me other than that which I permit it to have. I have to learn to live today, as this is the only time I will ever know. Ernest Holmes: A New Design for Living, p 133
When it works, it’s a fabulous sense of YES!. Knowing that I can recognize where and who I am and that gives me the power to disentangle myself from the wayward emotions that misdirect so much of my time. It is our default tendency to “emote” life rather than live it . Here it comes again – Live it Here and Now.
I’m learning for me that truly seeing and ‘accepting’ what is now, does not mean acquiescing to a state. It can and should mean being here without attaching so that I can see my next best steps in this present to build a better future.
And sometimes it works.
-In Peace, Mariann